'Thank you, Jesus, for hitting me upside the head with this brick.'" The film caused a furor when it opened. The Times convened a panel discussion that in- cluded Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X s widow, to address "issues raised by the film." Stanley Crouch's scathing review in the Village Voice was titled "Do the Race Thing: Spike Lee's Mro-Fascist Chic," and ac- cused Lee of immaturity and propagan- dizing for black nationalism. In fact, Lee is as hard on the film's black characters for their political apathy as he is on the pizzeria owner, Sal, who is scarcely a one- dimensional race baiter; "Do the Right Thing" is inarguably among the most thoughtful and unsentimental medita- tions on race relations committed to film. Scorsese calls it "a wonderfi.ù film, a tough picture that puts it right out there." The Times praised it as an "astounding politi- cal and moral drama." "Do the Right Thing" changed the public perception of Lee. From the "black Woody Allen," he became a kind of Mal- colm X of American cinema. "Mter 'Do the Right Thing,' it was 'He wants to throw garbage cans and burn down every pizzeria in America,'" Lee says. His sub- sequent films were controversial even when he did not intend them to be. "Mo' Better Blues," his next feature, was an at- tempt, inspired by his musician father, to defY stereotypes about black jazz artists as self-destructive drug addicts. But the movie included two venal Jewish club owners, Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John T urturro and his younger brother, Nicholas), who exploit the film's black jazz musicians, played by Denzel Wash- ington and Wesley Snipes. Lee says that he was shocked when critics characterized the portrayal of the club owners as anti- Semitic. According to Lee, his lawyer at the time, Arthur Klein, who has since died, told him, "This could really hurt your career. You better write an Op- Ed piece in the N ew York Times." Leè s piece, published in the summer of 1990 and ti- tled "I Am Not an Anti-Semite," was combative. "I challenge anyone to tell me why I can't portray two club owners who happen to be Jewish and who exploit the black jazz musicians who work for them," Lee wrote. "All Jewish club owners are not like this, that's true, but these two are." Lee is still angry about the accusa- tions. "They're, like, 'So, Spike, are you 60 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 saying that every single Jewish person is a crook?'" he told me. "Get the fuck out of here! That's crazy." W hen Lee and Dickerson were in film school, they often discussed their ideal movie project. "For both of us, it was to try to do an adaptation of 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,'" Dicker- son says. Lee had first read the book in junior high school and later called it the ". b kI ' ll d " most Important 00 ever rea , say- ing that it "changed the way I thought; it changed the way I acted." In 1990, Lee learned that the director Norman Jewi- son was going to make a movie about Malcolm X for the producer Marvin Worth, who had bought the rights to Malcolm's autobiography. Jewison had worked on the movie for almost a year, securing Denzel Washington for the lead role, digging up F.B.I. transcripts, and writing a script. Lee did not believe that a white director was up to the task-and said so in the press. J ewison told me, "I feel that he had pulled the race card, so I met with him." According to J ewison, at the meeting Lee said that a white direc- tor lacked "the deep understanding of the black psyche" necessary for the project. Jewison agreed to turn the movie over to Lee, who rewrote the script and began filming in 1991. The production was fraught with problems. "We were trying to make a better movie than Warner Bros. wanted," Dickerson, who was the cinematogra- pher, says. "For the Egypt scenes, W ar- ner Bros.' s attitude was We don't need to send you guys to Egypt, just go to South Jersey, shoot on the beach, get some place with some sand, and do matte paintings of the pyramids and everything.' And they wanted a two-hour movie. There's no way you can condense a man whose life was as complex as Malcolm's into two hours." Lee refused to compromise, and eventually went to prominent members of the black community for money to complete the film as he envisioned it. Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jack- son, Prince, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chap- man, Magic Johnson, and Michael J or- dan all contributed money to the movie, which ran three hours and included a se- quence shot on location in Egypt. The film documented Malcolm's early casti- gation of white people as "blue-eyed dev- ils," but artfully traced the spiritual devel- opment that led him to achieve a broader sympathy, even for whites. "Malcolm X' was released in the fall of 1992 to mixed reviews and a disappointing box-office take of about ten million dollars in its first weekend. Through the rest of the nineties and into this decade, box-office returns for Lee's films followed a steady downward trend. "Clockers," Leè s 1995 adaptation of Richard Price's novel about a young black drug dealer (played by Mekhi Phi- fer), took in slightly more than thirteen million dollars at the box office. "Girl 6," the closest Lee has come to making a light comedy since "She's Gotta Have It," took in less than five million. In 1998, he released "He Got Game," for which he wrote the screenplay-his first since ''Jungle Fever." The movie was an affecting melodrama about a killer (Den- zel Washington) who is offered a re- duced sentence in exchange for persuad- ing his estranged son, a high-school basketball star, to sign with "Big State University." It won praise, even from Stanley Crouch, but took in only about twenty million at the box office. "Sum- mer of Sam," Lee's bravura re-creation of the dismal summer of 1977-a film that Scorsese calls "excellent," and which de- served to be a commercial success-also failed to become a hit. In 2000, he wrote "Bamboozled," a bitter satire about down-and-out Mrican- American actors performing a hit TV show in blackface. The film lashed out indiscriminately at anyone whom Lee perceived to be ex- ploiting black people-including the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger (who appeared as a character called Timmi Hillnigger) and gangsta-rap groups. (An avowed fan of hip-hop, Lee has never- theless criticized 50 Cent and other rap- pers for promoting violence in black communities. "I try not to listen to gang- " h ld " I ' h I . " ) sta rap, e to me. t s not e pIng. Lee shot "Bamboozled" on a shoestring budget, with Sony digital handicams, often using up to ten cameras at a time to capture the action. The movie took in just over two million dollars. Lee's visi- bility as a feature-film director had